France’s Schneider Electric has raised its offer for UK software developer Aveva to just under £10bn as it seeks to win over investors that had rejected its first offer as opportunistic.
Schneider said it would increase the price from £31 per share to £32.22, or 4 per cent, and pushed back the date of a vote by Aveva shareholders on the deal by a week to November 25.
This would value the deal at £9.86bn, a 47 per cent premium over Aveva’s closing share price in August, before Schneider’s original offer. Aveva shares were trading steadily at £31.69 on Friday afternoon.
The French group, which already owns nearly 60 per cent of Aveva, said the bid would be its last unless a rival offer emerged.
Some shareholders had pushed back against the deal since it was unveiled in September, saying Schneider’s offer did not reflect the company’s potential and was taking advantage of weakness in its share price.
Canada-based Mawer Investment, a top-10 Aveva investor, had warned it would consider a revised offer “in the higher thirties”.
This week, top five shareholder, hedge fund Davidson Kempner said it would reject the initial bid.
Schneider will need to secure support from at least 75 per cent of minority shareholders, and cannot vote itself. This means it would take only about 10 per cent of the overall shareholder base to reject the deal to block it.
Aveva, which is focused on the energy, infrastructure and manufacturing sectors, is one of Britain’s oldest technology companies and was spun out of Cambridge university in the 1960s.
Industrial conglomerate Schneider provides automation and software services to help companies improve energy efficiency in buildings and factories.
In recent weeks, it has played down its enthusiasm for an agreement, saying it is “not an absolute must-do deal” and adding that it could simply retain its current stake.
The company had envisaged the takeover as a means of speeding up some of its integration plans around data as it oversees a push at Aveva to move to a subscription-based model. Analysts have said that overhaul may be challenging and take time.
Schneider still aims to close the deal in the first quarter of 2023.